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During a medical examination, 13-year-old Aslan is humiliated in front of a load of his fellow pupils. The incident unleashes his latent personality disorder. Plagued by self-doubt, he strives for cleanliness and perfection and is obsessed with trying to control everything around him. His compulsion draws Aslan, who lives with his grandmother in a village in Kazakhstan, into increasingly difficult situations. He abhors the way most of his fellow pupils are held in the sway of a criminal scheme, in which Bolat, one of Aslan’s tormentors, is also involved. Bolat blackmails the younger children into paying him protection money; he has nothing but contempt for ostracised Aslan.

Yerken is nine years old and lives alone in a remote village in the mountains. When his older brother returns after a long absence, the young boy’s heart leaps with joy. But it doesn’t last long, his older brother has become a cold and heartless person… Serik Aprymov was born in 1960 in Kazakhstan and studied film at the Moscow Film School (VGIK). Along with other young directors from his country, he became part of the “new wave” of Kazakh cinema. At the Locarno Film Festival in 2004, he presented Okhotnik (The Hunter), in which a young boy suffers the contrast between the traditions of his people now on the decline and the progress of an increasingly urbanized new society.